


Boxes

by fengirl88



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen, Loss, Memory, Pre-Canon, Quadruple Drabble, objects - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22203643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/pseuds/fengirl88
Summary: "God knows why your mother kept all this," Geoffrey's father says.  "You want to take it now, or – "
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Boxes

"God knows why your mother kept all this," Geoffrey's father says. "You want to take it now, or – "

Still on his best funeral behaviour, then. Probably thinking of the church and golf club crowd downstairs, clutching their plates of miniature sausage rolls and crustless triangular sandwiches. 

Geoffrey sits and stares at the boxes on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Maybe there are words for this, but right now he can't think what they are. 

Stencilled theatre programmes from the 1970s. Arac's helmet from Princess Ida, the last G&S they'd done before he went away to university. Flyers for student shows - Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Godspell. A plague doctor's mask covered in glitter, from Darren's second-year Duchess of Malfi. Clippings from the campus newspaper and the local press. 

The old President's Choice shortbread tin that used to be her sewing-box is full of theatre tickets, some of them stubs but more of them unused. All those years when Geoffrey would send them tickets for every show he did, his father never came to watch him. His mother came when she could, which wasn't that often. She'd promised to come to Hamlet, though she couldn't make it to opening night: a clash with parents' evening at her school. She'd been planning to come the first weekend, but by then Geoffrey was in the hospital.

"Don't come here," he told her when she rang the ward. "I don't want you to see this place."

She'd protested, asked if he was sure, and he'd tried not to hear the note of relief in her voice, faint but clear. An hour's drive away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world.

"Are you OK? No, I know. I mean. Are you going to be OK?"

"I don't know," he said. "I guess."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear, but the truth would have been worse.

He wishes now he'd kept the letters she wrote him while he was in there. He'd torn some of them up unread, thrown away the rest. She didn't understand, but at least she'd tried to keep the lines open between them, which was more than anyone else had done, back then.

"Yes, well," his father says, turning away abruptly. "I'll leave you to it."

Geoffrey doesn't answer. He leans back against the bed and goes on staring blankly at the boxes.

**Author's Note:**

> fill for the Box challenge at fan_flashworks; thanks to theicescholar for suggestions about containers ♥


End file.
